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Computers Might Never Be Able To Solve These Three Problems

March 18, 2016

Written byCuriosity Staff

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In computer science, an undecidable problem is one that requires a yes or no answer, but is impossible for any known computer to reliably solve. Three of these problems are the halting problem, Kolmogorov complexity, and the Wang tile problem. The halting problem refers to whether a computer can determine if a program will ever finish running, whereas Kolmogorov complexity deals with compression, and the impossibility of perfectly compressing any given file. Wang tiles are square tiles with a color on each side. Infinitely placing them next to each other so that the colors of each side match the colors on the adjacent squares is called "tiling the plane," and there is currently no computer that can predict whether a given set of Wang tiles will tile the plane. Dive deeper into these computer conundrums in the video below.

3 Problems Computers Will Never Solve

Computers can't do everything. Here are three problems that they'll never conquer.